The Spirit of Don West Lives On

I’d be lying if I said that I knew who Gary Vaynerchuk was a month ago. It wasn’t till the National came and went that his Tweets starting polluting my Twitter feed on a weekly basis. As stagnant as this hobby has gotten, having an “internet personality”, according to Wikipedia, talk about baseball cards can be pretty exiting to many collectors. Little by little, this motivational speaker and millionaire began Tweeting about cards regularly. I should have know something was up.

This weekend, “GaryVee”, a man with an estimated net worth of $160 million, began selling junk wax era baseball cards to his nearly 2 million Twitter followers for prices so outrageous, it was humorous. Unfortunately, he sold the hell out of them. Look, I’ve already started the hobby hashtag #SpendYourMoneyWisely so this shouldn’t even bother me. How you spend your hard-earned money is your business.

Unfortunately, the people Gary is targeting, are completely clueless. These aren’t current collectors with knowledge about what they are getting. We already know 1987 Topps is worthless, that early 90s “Broder” holograms are junk. These cards will sit in card shops until the day the owners go out of business because we know better. Unfortunately, Gary’s followers don’t have a clue.

(50) 1989 Cap’n Crunch Mark McGwire – $50.00An airbrushed mess that you could never sell for a single dollar.

The problem is, much like a pyramid scheme, foolish people bought into the online hype created by Gary and ate this stuff up without having the knowledge that every dealer at every card show in America will give you multiple copies of these cards for a dime. Gary made a couple of thousand dollars from his loyal fan base by proving that in 2018, there is still a sucker born every minute.

After being called out by many collectors, Gary responded to the criticism and even some of my own Tweets. I felt he handled the backlash well, after all, a millionaire 100 times over hardly needs to sell junk wax on Twitter so it’s not like he set out to intentionally rip off his own followers. At least that’s what I’d like to believe. He also added in another Tweet that he was sending books and other surprises with the packages.

Didn’t create enough context for the card collecting community on twitter the fun I was having with my business community today, that’s on me. Will have to create more clarity in future. Also exited to get more serious and have fun trading ect .. sorry for that pic.twitter.com/S4bmz27F8S

I don’t have a million followers or the type of money Gary does but it is important to get the word out that cards from the late 80s and early 90s, for the most part, are not worth investing in. That is putting it nicely. Look, I used to love watching late night shopping networks and finding that fat, loudmouth Don West pushing millions of junk wax cards on unsuspecting prospectors looking to get rich overnight. It was a scam that I was lucky to avoid because I was a young, poor teenager.

Trust me, you may find a bit of nostalgia after spending a few hundred dollars on some junk wax from Gary Vee but it won’t last very long and when you find out your cards are essentially worth less than a kick to the nuts, you’re going to feel like a damn fool for not doing your research before giving your cash to a millionaire. At the end of the day you’re paying for a Twitter follow from Gary, one of his books and nothing more.

2 comments

This “sort of” makes me wish I was more active on Twitter. I really, really miss the Don West days. There was a time I’d set my VCR to record in the middle of the night, so I could come home from school the next day and watch all of the “awesome” deals he had to offer. But that’s coming from a collector who had been around for awhile. In hindsight… I feel bad for all of the grandmas who bought all of the SAH crap.